Ask who invented the incandescent lamp, and history has recorded 22 names before Joseph Wilson Swan and Thomas Edison. Although Edison’s lamp prevailed thanks to its efficiency, it was the Briton Swan who secured the first patent, in 1878.
His house in Gateshead, England, was the first in the world to be lit by electric light bulbs, while the first public building lit by his lamp was the Savoy Theatre in London, in 1881.
Although the lamp technology went unused for lack of means, the first architectural lighting project is recorded in 1889 in Paris, where 10,000 gas lamps were installed to illuminate what was then the tallest structure in the world, the Eiffel Tower.
Twenty-eight years later (in 1917), the first installation with moving heads made its appearance. Installed in Times Square in New York, it was the forerunner of what later became building façade lighting.
LEDs, which today are at the cutting edge of lighting technology, were invented in 1927 by the Russian Oleg Vladimirovich Losev. For many decades they went unused because they produced only red light, at very low intensity. In 1970 LEDs in more colours appeared, and their significant development began in the 1980s, when the compound GaAlAs (gallium aluminum arsenide) contributed to their rapid growth from that point on.
The next milestone was the Wind Tower in Yokohama in 1986, the first interactive building, whose lighting interacted with environmental elements such as sound and wind.
In the same period, Rem Koolhaas’s OMA designed a project that was pioneering for its time, the “Center for Art and Media” in the German city of Karlsruhe. The concept included a video projection on the building’s façade, which was covered in LEDs. This move paved the way for today’s media façades…
